Page 172 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

How English am I? 165
BB: And that’s a more positive one?
Madeleine: Yeah. In lots of ways definitely.
BB: Because?
Madeleine: Because, um, because although, you know London has lots
of... downsides to it, it’s also, I don’t know, it’s lively, it’s very
very multicultural and you can just be part of ...I went to live
in Wales for a little while and it was just like [horrified expres-
sion], it wasn’t even Welsh, do you know what I mean, there
wasn’t even any Welsh culture there at all. Whereas I think in
London people are very vocal about their cultures and what
they’re doing. And I’m sure people like, even more so in some
of the northern cities, you know because at heart even us Lon-
doners are quite repressed and don’t like to talk to each other.
...I like, I really like the mix of people here and I like the
fact that there’s different things, there’s different colours and
cultures and, you know, I like the fact that there’s different, you
know you can go and sit in Kensington Gardens and then come
back to Peckham. You have access to all sorts of different places,
which is nice.
(Interview 9)

For Madeleine, whereas British or English identities were loaded with
negative historical associations (and, interestingly, in contrast to other inter-
viewees, she did not view Wales romantically or positively), London had
more positive associations. Madeleine embraced the ‘liveliness’ and multi-
cultural aspects of London. However, it is interesting how her description
was racialised and classed. Part of the liveliness of London came from differ-
ences, the way in which it offered the experience of spaces that were classed
and raced in different ways. Kensington Gardens and Peckham offer very
different experiences of London life which Madeleine could move between.
Yet at the same time, she was positioned as white and middle class by this
account – it was not one that a black person or a working-class person could
give. The ability to move as easily between Peckham and Kensington Gar-
dens is not available to all equally. Nonetheless, for Madeleine, people living
in London – ‘us Londoners’ – had a collective identity and shared patterns
of behaviour and attitude much as people might talk about ‘the British’.
Unlike Englishness, which in some constructions is threatened by otherness,
for Madeleine, difference was contained within the category of Londoner,
constructed as a positive and constitutive attribute.

Conclusion

I think for black people who live in Britain this question of finding some
way in which the white British can learn to live with us and the rest